I've been studying multiboxing for the past week and have tried a few different applications all to varying degree of failure (Multibox, Synergy, Octopus). The furthest I got was with Synergy, which I could get to share my mouse & keyboard, but not broadcast keys. I only want something very basic and Synergy would work if I knew how to make it broadcast keystrokes to the host and client simultaneously.

Octopus seems very promising but my problem is one of the boxes is an XP Pro box and one is a Windows 2000 box. I can run up to Octopus version 1.07 on the 2000 box, but nothing newer since the .net architecture version 3.5 does support Windows 2000.

So my question is this, can I run the 1.07 client on the Windows 2000 box and run the latest version as the server? I can get it to register keystrokes that way (it indicates they are TCP Pings at this point, I can't figure out how to make it broadcast the keys themselves. I've been using Notepad for testing).

Are there common configuration files people use for setting up these applications? I've looked around for a configuration guide but am getting a bit lost in the cross version tangle and there's no helpfile outside of sites such as this.

(To those who would point out the "obvious", I see that KeyClone is the big dog around here, but I am looking for a solution not reliant upon a hosted authentication service and am unwilling to pay in advance before I know if I have enough brainpower to make it work.)

-Damian